MASCOUCHE, Que. — A stunning helicopter escape from prison allegedly began with a gun being pulled on a pilot who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A police charge sheet says accomplices used a .38-calibre handgun to hijack a helicopter and force the pilot to veer off course and toward a prison in St-Jerome.

The two alleged accomplices and the two escaped convicts, who were all arrested within hours, appeared in court Monday.

They were slapped with nearly two-dozen charges and, although they did not enter a plea, they were expected to do so as early as their next court appearance on April 16.

At least one of the suspects has been linked over the years in news reports to the Hells Angels criminal biker gang; police said Monday that they considered the fugitives armed and extremely dangerous.

There was an exchange of gunfire during the operation, police said Monday.

Provincial police spokesman Benoit Richard said the gun shots rang out at a rural cabin where the fugitives had been tracked down the previous day. He said nobody was injured.

The men staged their dramatic daylight jailbreak Sunday when they climbed a rope into a hovering helicopter.

Their freedom was shortlived as police moved swiftly to track them down at the cabin.

Just before 8:30 p.m. E.T., about six hours after the escape, police confirmed they had arrested Benjamin Hudon-Barbeau and two other suspects.

Much of the action took place in Chertsey, Que., about 50 kilometres north of the jail in Saint-Jerome from where the inmates escaped.

The suspects just took the rope in their hands and started fleeing

Officers had blocked off the main road in Chertsey, not far from the village of St-Marguerite, and were pulling over cars Sunday night.

Graham Hughes / THe Canadian PressPolice vehicles block a road just outside the town of Chertsey, Que. on Sunday during a search for escaped prisoners.

Earlier Sunday, authorities said 36-year-old Hudon-Barbeau and 33-year-old Danny Provencal had broken out of the jail by clambering up a rope into a waiting helicopter.

“The suspects just took the rope in their hands and started fleeing,” Richard recalled the jail’s warden saying.

Police had tracked down the helicopter about 85 kilometres away in Mont-Tremblant, but only the chopper’s pilot was still at the scene.

The pilot was taken to an area hospital where investigators were expected to speak with him.

Richard said the pilot was treated for shock and is considered an important witness in the case. Reports said police believe the pilot was coerced into participating in the escape.

Hours after the jailbreak, a Montreal radio station, 98.5 FM, received a call from a man claiming to be Hudon-Barbeau, who said he was “ready to die” as he tried to evade police.

The way they’re treating me in there, it’s unreal. They won’t let me be. They put me back in prison for nothing

“The way they’re treating me in there, it’s unreal,” the man told the radio station. “They won’t let me be. They put me back in prison for nothing.”

Authorities did not immediately speak to the claims made in the radio station interview.

Richard said Hudon-Barbeau had suffered a non-firearm related injury during the incident and was under guard in hospital.

One news report said he plunged from a two-storey height and broke bones during the helicopter escape.

According to a provincial police release, Hudon-Barbeau was arrested in November 2012 on two firearm-related charges and associating with people who have a criminal record. The arrest came as part of an investigation into a double-murder in Quebec’s Laurentians.

Yves Galarneau, the correctional services manager who oversees the St-Jerome jail said he’d never seen anything like Sunday’s dramatic escape in more than three decades on the job.

Galarneau said there are no security measures in place at the jail to prevent a helicopter from swooping down from above.

“As far as I know, it’s a first in Quebec,” he told reporters at the scene. “It’s exceptional.”

When they got out of their vehicle they started shooting

While the tactic may have been a first for Quebec, using a chopper to break out of jail has a long and colourful history, and not just in the movies.

A New York businessman, Joel David Kaplan, used a chopper to escape from a Mexican jail in 1971, and went on to write a book about it.

Pascal Payet, a French prisoner, used a helicopter to escape on three occasions, only to be caught by authorities every time.

The facility at the centre of Sunday’s escapade in Quebec is a provincial detention centre with a maximum-security wing.

The St-Jerome jail, located some 60 kilometres northwest of Montreal, experienced a mini-riot by about a dozen prisoners a little over a month ago.

In that incident, police had been asked to secure the outside of the prison.

L’EPIPHANIE, Que. — An inability to clearly see the precariously shifting ground beneath them caused rescue crews to suspend their search Tuesday night for two Quebec quarry workers who are missing after an apparent landslide swept several vehicles into a pit nearly 100 metres deep.

Two trucks and an excavator were trapped in huge mounds of loose gravel at the bottom of the snowy crater in L’Epiphanie, Que., just east of Montreal.

A third worker had managed to climb out of the excavator with what police described as minor injuries, after the vehicle tumbled down the steep embankment.

“Since we are not able to see what is going on and to confirm the security of the people that’s involved in the search and rescue, right now it’s going to start again tomorrow morning,” provincial police spokesman Benoit Richard said Tuesday night, adding that specialists at the rescue site had recommended the suspension.

Rescue workers will attempt to bring heavy equipment down to the site on Wednesday morning, and will continue to use search dogs and thermal equipment in their attempts to locate the missing workers.

“Tomorrow we’re going to try a safe protocol or procedure for everyone to be safe and try to bring the excavator and other heavy equipment down on the ground. That’s our main concern for tomorrow,” said Repentigny, Que., police spokesman Bruno Marier.

Helicopters had been making numerous trips into the narrow crevasse of the quarry earlier on Tuesday, where the vehicles were strewn about like toys.

A chopper had to be used to airlift the worker who clambered out of the quarry. Richard said the man suffered from frostbite, shock and minor injuries.

“He seems, overall, in pretty good shape,” he said.

Two helicopters swooped into the pit numerous times during the day to drop off police officers, firefighters, geologists and a sniffer dog.

Armed with shovels and a thermal camera, rescue teams sifted through the heavy gravel in hope of finding the missing workers.

Rescuers managed to remove enough stone to peer into the cab of one of the trucks — but police said nobody was inside. The vehicle was partially buried in the gravel and was lying almost completely upside down.

By nightfall, neither of the workers had been found.

“We haven’t found anybody,” Richard said. “We need to find them.”

Richard had initially told reporters the search would continue into the night, and that the helicopters could operate in the dark, however the unstable soil in the pit combined with working in the dark resulted in the search being suspended.

“Time is working against us,” Richard had said, adding that rescuers still had no ground access to the bottom of the steep quarry.

Reporters asked an official from the Public Security Department about the survival chances of the workers.

“I’m not a doctor, but for sure time is passing and it’s not a good thing,” Paul Lefebvre told a media scrum.

The local mayor watched rescue operations anxiously from the lip of the quarry.

Before the earth apparently gave way at the top of the quarry, the excavator was filling the trucks with gravel at the site.

Authorities were investigating the cause of the apparent landslide.

Late Tuesday, a geologist advising search crews said the excavation of the site, combined with the nature of the pit’s underlying clay soil sandwiched between gravel which had been excavated, may have led to the slide.

“Right now it’s an hypothesis,” said Richard. “We are at the start of the investigation, we’re going to work with our partners to find what caused the landslide.”

It’s kind of a risky and a tough situation

THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham HughesRescuers search for missing workers Tuesday.